It should be a cause for celebration that a quarter of British newborns last year had a foreign parent
Robert Winder
Saturday August 25, 2007
The Guardian
A week is a long time in immigration. This one began with an angry argument about the fate of a foreign-born convict and ended with a slanging match about last year’s comings and goings. It seemed that record numbers of people were arriving and record numbers were leaving, in disgust. Eastern European numbers were falling, except in Scotland, but the workers were getting choosy: summer fruit was rotting unpicked in the fields.
Some said that migrants were feasting on benefits, others that they were being exploited as slaves. Asylum figures, meanwhile, were dwindling to a trickle: fewer than 2,000 applications a month.
It wasn’t easy to pick a path through this barrage of contradictory truths. But there may have been less here than met the eye. Of the 574,000 who came in the year ending July 2006, 91,000 were Britons returning from abroad. Of the 385,000 going the other way, only half were native-born emigrants. It all added up to a less than combustible truth: arrivals were slightly down and departures were slightly up.
With the sound and fury filtered out, one nugget still winked in the pan. According to the Office for National Statistics, a full quarter of Britain’s 734,000 newborns had a foreign parent. This was genuinely arresting, a challenging national fact. What kind of a country were we becoming? Even those who believe that immigration is a form of enrichment had to gulp.
It is no longer news that immigration is an old story. The European Protestants who fled the Reformation, the slaves who escaped the transports, the Irish who dug canals and laid railway tracks, the Italian cobblers, chestnut and ice cream salesmen, the Baltic Jews who fled tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century: Britain has accommodated many waves of migration - never without a squabble, but usually with liberality as well.
Sometimes the numbers have been surprising: in 1764 the Gentleman’s Magazine estimated that there were 20,000 “negroe servants” in London, a solid 3% of the total population.
The country has been much changed by these commotions. Without immigration we would lose Ritz, Schweppes, Brunel and Selfridge. We could lay no claim to Eliot, Conrad, Naipaul and Brendel, and would never have known Triumph, ICI, Warburg or Rothschild. We wouldn’t have pizzas and pastas, curries and spring rolls, kebabs and oxtail soup, a Huguenot speciality. We would skip tea - not by accident is it served in “china”. And who would we cheer without our migrant cricketers, footballers, athletes and boxers? Even characters who seem typically British - Winston Churchill (American mother), Audrey Hepburn (née Eda van Heemstra), and Stephen Fry (Austrian mother) - turn out to have foreign parentage.
These and many other fruits of immigration are well known. But this week’s news about British children confirms that our time, the era of cheap transport, easy communication and piercing inequality, is mingling the world’s peoples in a way that is not quite precedented. It is no longer a question of ethnic “minorities”, some of which are large enough to need the name no longer. The mothers and fathers of modern Britain’s children are American, Irish and Chinese, German and Ghanaian, Australian, Somali, Indian and French, Greek, Colombian, Russian, Jamaican. Somewhere out there are toddlers with Danish-Iranian or Sri Lankan-Italian roots. Something new is being created here.
If anything, we should cheer. The one in four figure suggests a hearty appetite for cross-national marriages and partnerships. One recent ICM/BBC survey found that 87% of white Britons approved of such unions. Increasingly, it seems, the nation’s different nationalities are making love, not war.
But will Britain really be Brazil without the sunshine? Probably not. There have been many recent attempts to pin down British “values”, most of which founder on the obvious fact that they barely differ from Japanese values. It is the things that are uniquely British that will mould and motivate these increasingly cosmopolitan children.
It would be nice to think that they will enjoy a harmonious future. But immigration has always inspired wariness and rancour: there have been riots against foreigners since the mob went after Jews in the 13th century. It is one of Britain’s favourite pastimes, especially on hot bank holidays. If the sun shines and the drink flows in Notting Hill this weekend, we might get a sour reminder that immigration is rarely smooth and can be brutal. So is growing old, and railing against that never did anyone any good. But if the past teaches us anything, it is that we rarely learn from it.
· Robert Winder is the author of Bloody Foreigners: the Story of Immigration to Britain
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